A public health advertisement that campaigned to make New Zealand “the best place in the world to have herpes” has won a top prize at the Cannes Lions – one of world’s most prestigious advertising awards.
The campaign, launched by the New Zealand Herpes Foundation in October last year, attempts to challenge decades of entrenched stigma around genital herpes – a condition that affects up to 80% of New Zealanders at some point in their lives, the foundation said.
The cheeky take on a retro-style tourism video features former All Blacks coach Sir Graham Henry lamenting the loss of New Zealand’s clout on the international stage – the sheep to human ratio is “embarrassingly low”, pies are “pushing seven bucks” and the country’s pride is “less than outstanding”, he opines.
“We need something new to be proud of, something big and brave to put us back on the map – it’s time for New Zealand to become the best place in the world to have herpes,” Henry says.
The promotional video is followed by a “Herpes Destigmatisation Course”, fronted by prominent New Zealanders such as former director-general of health Sir Ashley Bloomfield, former All Black Sir Buck Shelford and boxer Mea Motu.
The campaign – developed alongside Auckland-based agency Motion Sickness and Sydney agency FINCH – was awarded the Lions health and UN foundation grand prix for good, for “unabashedly [using] humour to tackle a challenging subject and stigmatisation”.
“Our 2025 awardee took a taboo topic and turned it on its head – showing that with a great strategy, a big, bold crazy idea, and humour for days, that anything is possible,” said David Ohana, Cannes Lions jury president.
Claire Hurst, one of the foundation’s founding trustees, told the Guardian herpes is mostly medically insignificant but that “a lifetime of societal conditioning” around the word “herpes” makes coping with a diagnosis difficult for many.
Never in her 30 years of doing this work has a campaign to destigmatise the infection had such cut-through, Hurst said.
“As soon as you just put it out there, and people can just say ‘you see, it’s cold sores’ and ‘yeah, a lot of us have them and most of us don’t know’, then it stops being the big bogey man.”